Meet the team

Dr. Ryan Banach

Family Medicine Early Career Supports Lead

Dr. Banach is the Early Career Supports Lead, a role where he helps family physicians in their first five years navigate their practice of comprehensive family medicine. Dr. Banach is a lecturer at DFCM who has been practicing comprehensive office-based family medicine in the Jane and Finch neighbourhood of Toronto. Dr. Banach is on the Section of General and Family Practice (SGFP) Tariff committee, and is the Co-chair of the Northwest Toronto Primary Care Network. He is passionate about practice management and frequently delivers presentations to physicians to help them better understand the business side of medicine. He also presents seminars on billing, office efficiency, and career management to Ontario family physicians. 

Early Career Supports Webpage

Dr. Rajesh Girdhari 

Digital Health Lead

Dr. Girdhari is the Digital Health Lead, a role that will work with Ontario Health-Toronto Region to support the rollout of primary care IT initiatives to serve our patients, communities, and the primary care providers of the region as well as DFCM faculty and learners. Dr. Girdhari is an Assistant Professor at DFCM who provides primary care and addiction medicine services to people in the Regent Park community as a family physician on the St. Michael’s Hospital Academic Family Health Team at Sumac Creek Health Centre. He has been a lead for both IT and quality improvement at St. Michael’s Hospital DFCM since 2015. Prior to these roles, he worked as a partner and clinical lead at a health IT start-up company in Toronto. He also has experience working in community emergency rooms and addiction medicine services across the GTA.

Dr. Catherine Yu

Engagement Lead

Dr. Yu is the Engagement Lead, a role that will support a coordinated approach to Ontario Health Teams primary care leadership. Dr. Yu is an Assistant Professor at DFCM and a community and family physician. She is Medical Director of Health Access Thorncliffe Park. An emergency physician for more than 10 years, she is now a passionate advocate for her community patients. In 2019, she received the Ontario College of Family Physicians Award of Excellence for her leadership in supporting vulnerable populations. Dr. Yu is also Chair of the Board of Directors for the East Toronto Family Practice Network, a community of family physicians with a mission to create equitable access to inter-professional care for all family practices.

Dr. Karen Weyman

Education Lead

Dr. Weyman is the Education Lead, a role that provides leadership, strategic advice, and advocacy in supporting Ontario Health-Toronto Region and DFCM education programming. Dr. Weyman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto, and the Family Physician-in-Chief of the Department of Family and Community Medicine at St. Michael’s Hospital. Since joining the St. Michael’s Hospital in 1993, she has been a passionate advocate for underserved populations. From 1993 to 2015, Dr. Weyman was the Medical Director at Covenant House Toronto, the largest youth shelter in Canada. Dr. Weyman has also had a sustained interest in medical education, with a focus on mentorship, creating a positive learning environment and longitudinal learning. She holds a Master of Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, and is a past program director of undergraduate education at St Michael’s Hospital. In addition to her leadership roles, she continues to provide comprehensive primary care, and teach and mentor medical students and residents.

Shantel Walcott, MSc

Program Manager

Shantel supports the OHSP leadership in the planning and implementation of strategic initiatives to strengthen primary care through collaboration with regional, provincial, national, and global partners. With over 13 years of experience in the university sector, she brings a strong foundation in project management, strategic planning, and applied research to advance quality improvement initiatives aligned with departmental goals. Outcomes-focused and highly collaborative, she has a proven ability to build strong relationships across diverse communities and partner groups. Shantel is passionate about advancing primary care and health equity and thrives in dynamic, mission-driven environments.

Dr. Danielle Martin

Chair, Department of Family and Community Medicine

Dr. Danielle Martin is Chair of the Department of Family and Community Medicine (DFCM), University of Toronto. DFCM is the largest academic department of family medicine in the world and home to the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre on Family Medicine and Primary Care. Dr. Martin is grounded in her clinical primary care expertise. She is an active family physician whose clinical work has ranged from comprehensive family medicine in rural and remote communities to maternity care. She is a dedicated educator, mentor and role model to learners aspiring to enter medicine and health care leadership. 

Dr. Martin is a respected leader in Canadian medicine and well-recognized media spokesperson, regularly named on lists such as Medical Post’s Power List. Her 2014 presentation to a United States Senate Subcommittee about the Canadian health care system has been viewed by over 30 million people across the globe. Dr. Martin spent eight years as a senior hospital executive, most recently as Executive Vice President and Lead Medical Executive at Women’s College Hospital (WCH), where she was also medical lead of the hospital’s COVID-19 pandemic response. At WCH, she led the establishment of Women’s Virtual, Canada’s first virtual hospital. The recipient of many awards and accolades, in 2019 Dr. Martin became the youngest physician ever to receive the F.N.G. Starr Award, the highest honour available to Canadian Medical Association members.

Dr. Tara Kiran

Vice-Chair, Quality and Innovation
Fidani Chair in Improvement and Innovation 
Department of Family and Community Medicine 

Tara Kiran is the Fidani Chair in Improvement and Innovation and Vice-Chair Quality and Innovation at the Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of Toronto. Much of her research has focused on evaluating the impact of Ontario’s primary care reforms on quality of care. More recently, she is focusing her efforts on quality improvement research including initiatives to improve patient experience including access to care, increase cancer screening rates, treat Hepatitis C, reduce high-risk opioid prescribing, measure and reduce care disparities, and support physicians to learn from data. She practices family medicine at the St. Michael’s Hospital Academic Family Health Team where she led the quality improvement program from 2011 to 2018. She is a Scientist in the Centre for Urban Health Solutions at St. Michael’s Hospital and an Adjunct Scientist at ICES. 

Dr. Noah Ivers

Scientific Lead

Dr. Noah Ivers is a family physician at Women's College Hospital, scientist at Women’s College Research Institute, and innovation fellow at the Women's College Institute for Health System Solutions. He is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine and at the Institute for Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto. He holds a Canada Research Chair in the Implementation of Evidence Based Practice. Noah's research focuses on the use of data to drive evidence-based, patient-centred improvements in healthcare. He has conducted multiple pragmatic randomized trials, systematic reviews, and qualitative work on health services and quality improvement interventions.

Ali N. Damji, BHSc, MD, MSc., CCFP

Primary Care Collaborative Partnership Lead

Focus: Support the OHSP in its strategic goal to strengthen our relationship with the Ontario College of Family Physician (OCFP), the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) and/or other professional groups focused on improving primary care while supporting physician well-being.

Dr. Ali Damji is a family physician and addiction medicine physician from Mississauga, Canada. He works clinically at the Credit Valley Family Health Team and the Halton & Mississauga Rapid Access to Addiction Medicine Clinic. He is the Quality Improvement Program Director for the Credit Valley Family Medicine Teaching Unit and regularly teaches quality improvement to faculty, other health professionals, residents, and medical students locally and internationally at the Aga Khan University Hospital in Nairobi, Kenya, and the Makerere University in Uganda. He completed his medical school, family medicine residency, and Master of Science in System Leadership and Innovation at the University of Toronto.

He is Division Head of Primary Care at Trillium Health Partners where he leads approximately 300 family physicians. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Family & Community Medicine at the University of Toronto and an Investigator with the Institute for Better Health. He is also actively involved in leadership, serving as a member of the Board of Directors of the Centre for Effective Practice, a member of the Policy & Advocacy Committee of the Ontario Medical Association Section of General & Family Practice Executive, and Honorary Secretary-Treasurer for the Foundation for Advancing Family Medicine.

He is the recipient of numerous leadership and teaching awards including most recently the University of Toronto MD Program Teaching Award of Excellence, Department of Family & Community Medicine Mentorship Award for Undergraduate Medical Students, The COVID Hero Award from the City of Mississauga, multiple Quality and Innovation Awards from Trillium Health Partners and the College of Family Physicians of Canada Award of Excellence.

Jennifer Shuldiner, PhD 

Evaluation Faculty Lead

Focus: Co-lead the evaluation of the Peers for Joy initiative which integrates DFCM team members from wellness, quality and research. Guide the qualitative evaluation methodology for the interprofessional primary care teams.

Dr. Shuldiner is a scientist at Women's College Hospital and an assistant professor at the Institute of Health Policy and Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto. She also holds an AMS Healthcare Fellowship in Compassion and Artificial Intelligence and Digital Health. Her interests and methodological expertise lie in improving primary care through thoughtful design and rigorous evaluation to enable real-time improvements. She integrates a human-centered design approach, behavioural science, implementation science, and mixed methods to design, implement, and evaluate programs aimed at improving patient outcomes and experiences. Jennifer is passionate about the co-production of research to facilitate the development and implementation of effective, patient-centered, and provider-centered innovations. 

Jessica Bytautas, PhD

Academic Writing and Knowledge Translation Lead

Dr. Jessica Bytautas is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream in the Department of Health & Society at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She teaches across the areas of health policy and systems, health humanities, aging and society, and critical qualitative health research. Dr. Bytautas’s program of research examines how community-based and volunteer-led approaches to palliative care for structurally marginalized populations reimagine care beyond hierarchical systems through relational and creative practices. At OHSP, she contributes to policy-relevant knowledge dissemination through evidence syntheses that bridge academic, community, and health system audiences. Supported by a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship, Dr. Bytautas earned her PhD in social and behavioural health sciences from the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. She also holds an MSc in health services research from the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto and a BA(Hons) in philosophy from McMaster University.

Sydney Pearce, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow

Dr. Pearce’s work focuses on interprofessional primary care teams across a range of topics, including its impact on capacity, managing administrative burden, and implementation evaluation. She completed her PhD in epidemiology and One Health and is a mixed-methods researcher who aims to center equity and community voices in her work. She has a particular interest in knowledge synthesis methods (e.g., realist reviews, systematic reviews), knowledge translation, and implementation as mechanisms through which research moves on to facilitate real-world impact. She has received various academic excellence and knowledge translation awards during her research career and continues to learn in her current role which encompasses many projects with health system policy relevance, from local to international scales. In the future, she hopes to continue to conduct policy-relevant research and work closely with policymakers/health system actors to promote equitable, integrated, and effective health systems solutions.

Dr. Katherine Rouleau

Global Primary Health Care Lead

Dr. Katherine Rouleau is a family physician at Unity Health-St-Michael’s Hospital, and director of the WHO Collaborating Centre on Family Medicine and Primary Care at DFCM. Her clinical and academic interests include health equity, the role of family medicine and primary care in strengthening health systems locally and globally, global health education, the scholarship-leadership continuum and the care of disadvantaged populations in Canada and abroad.

Jack Westfall, MD, MPH

Senior Advisor, Health System Leadership

Focus: Provide strategic advice to faculty in the areas of community- based participatory primary care research, with a focus on capacity building at community sites.  

Jack grew up in Yuma, Colorado. During high school he worked in the hospital as a lab technician and earned his EMT. He completed his MD and master’s in public health at the University of Kansas School of Medicine, an internship in hospital medicine in Wichita, Kansas, and his Family Medicine Residency at the University of Colorado Rose Family Medicine Program. After joining the faculty at the University of Colorado Department of Family Medicine, Dr Westfall started the High Plains Research Network, a geographic community and practice-based research network in rural and frontier Colorado. He practiced family medicine in several rural communities including Limon, Ft Morgan, and his hometown of Yuma. He added Medication Assisted Treatment for opioid use disorder to his clinical care in 2016.The work of the HPRN and its participatory, Community Advisory Council has included funding from the CDC, NIH, AHRQ, and numerous state and local foundations. After retiring from the University of Colorado School of Medicine, he worked for several years as the Director for Whole Person Care at Santa Clara County Health and Hospitals in San Jose, California. He served for several years as the Director of the Robert Graham Center for policy research in primary care and family medicine in Washington DC. Returning to Colorado, he continues to consult and collaborate on primary care practice-based research, community-based participatory research, integrated primary care and behavioral health, and the interface between primary care, public, and community health. In addition to joining the faculty of the University of Toronto, Jack practices family medicine part-time in his hometown of Yuma, Colorado.